Association for Behavior Analysis International

We tested the effects of a speaker immersion procedure on the emission of vocal verbal operants in non-instructional settings for four 7-year old males diagnosed with Autism. Data were collected on vocal verbal operants in three non-instructional settings (group table top activity, snack time, and lunch time) for 5 minutes in each setting. Furthermore, data were collected on the emission of mands under 30 establishing operations (EO) probe opportunities. The four participants received a 15-minute speaker immersion session daily until they responded to criterion. During speaker immersion sessions, the experimenter completed 60 learn units of interrupting ongoing activities to increase establishing operations for mands. Using a multiple baseline design across participants, the results showed that speaker immersion was effective in increasing verbal operants across all participants, as well as increasing mand production in the target form for each participant after the completion of the intervention. Follow up probes were conducted a month later and the data show that the participants verbal vocal operants and responses to EO opportunities maintained using the target form of the mand.

The discrimination between positive and negative exemplars of the phonemic combinations in words result in more accurate speaker behavior as well as fluent listener behavior (Chavez-Brown, 2005; Choi, 2012; Greer & Ross, 2008). The purpose of this study was to conduct a systematic replication of the auditory match-to-sample (MTS) intervention developed by Choi (2012) and evaluate its effect on echoic responding, advanced listener literacy and the induction of Naming. Two kindergarten students in a self-contained special education classroom were chosen to participate in the study because they emitted a high number of echoics that lacked point-to-point correspondence between hearing and saying, as well as a low number of correct responses to instructions requiring responses to spoken antecedents in the presence of visual distractors. The auditory MTS protocol was used to teach the students to discriminate between positive and negative exemplars of different sounds and words by matching the target sound to the matching exemplar in the presence of a rotating-non-exemplar. The basic auditory MTS focuses on discriminations between sounds and words as well as discriminations between single words while the advanced auditory MTS was utilized for finer discriminations between rhyming words and phrases with only one word differences. The results from the study found that the auditory MTS protocol was effective in enhancing echoic responding to one to four-syllable common English words, developing advanced listener literacy when presented with visual distractors, and inducing the listener component of the Naming capability for novel stimuli.

Contemporary approaches to human language and cognitive development present an opportunity for a synthesis of new data emergent from stimulus equivalence and relational frame theories with existing theories of verbal behavior proposed by Skinner. The present study evaluated the derived relational abilities of 86 individuals with autism between the ages of 5 and 22 using the Promoting the Emergence of Advanced Knowledge Equivalence Module (PEAK-E) pre-assessment, as well as their corresponding results on the Verbal Behavior Milestones Assessment and Placement Program (VB-MAPP) as a measure of elementary verbal operant behavior. The results of the study suggested that participant results on the PEAK-E pre-assessments were strongly related to their results on the VB-MAPP. Further, most participants achieved the highest possible score on the VB-MAPP once they demonstrated transitive relational responding. The implications of the results both in terms of a theory of language development in children with autism and the treatment of associated limitations experienced by this population is discussed.

We tested the effects of a stimulus pairing Naming experience on the emergence of the listener and speaker components of Naming in 1 to 3 year old students in an Early Intervention Integrated classroom. We conducted a concurrent multiple probe design counterbalanced across 2 different conditions (book and iPad) and 2 different target sets (food and animals). Participants included 4 typically developing females who were selected for the study because they did not possess the listener or speaker components of Naming. Furthermore, we conducted our study in order to investigate how typically developing toddlers acquire language. Each participant was exposed to 4 sets of 4 stimuli each. During the stimulus pairing procedure the experimenter tacted and pointed to the stimulus on either the I-Pad or book and the participant shared in joint attention for 1-sec or more. Following 2-hours probes were conducted to test for the emergence of listener and speaker components for the target stimuli. Results showed no significant differences across conditions or stimuli. However, the stimulus pairing Naming experience was effective in inducing the listener component of Naming for 3 of the 4 participants and the speaker component in 1 participant. Increases in speaker responses differed across conditions; however speaker responses generally emerged following the second session. We conducted another probe post-3 weeks using the original condition for each participant. Results demonstrated that all 4 participants met criterion for the listener component and 1 participant met criterion for the speaker component.

J.R. Kantors Psychological Linguistics describes a natural science approach to studying linguistic behavior and interactions. The current study utilizes this theoretical approach to examine the development of referential linguistic interactions in a young child with autism enrolled in an early intensive behavioral intervention program. Specifically, tutors were first trained in a procedure to teach the child to initiate a referent. Then, a changing criterion design was used to teach the child to sustain referential behavior for an increasing number of interactions. On the basis of Kantors Psychological Linguistics, Bijou et al.s set of procedures developed for identifying and analyzing referential interactions was used to train tutors to identify referential linguistic behavior, and record and measure the interactions between the tutor and child. Generalization probes were also conducted to determine the extent to which improvements in referential interactions observed in treatment occurred in other settings and with other people.

Perceptions of race have generated an extensive amount of empirical attention in psychology, mostly through the use of self-report measures that involve well-known shortcomings when a behavioral approach is desired. In recent years, racial evaluations have been addressed with a variety of behavioral tasks that are otherwise known as implicit measures, including the Implicit Association Test. A recently-developed implicit measure known as the Implicit Relational Assessment Procedure (IRAP) is a behavior analytic alternative that has demonstrated utility in measuring racially stigmatizing attitudes. To date, the stimulus selection strategy for the IRAP has followed a straightforward approach involving response options for trials such as true/false, similar/different, and agree/disagree. The current study examined a modified IRAP configuration designed to assess racial attitudes with a new and unique approach to response options. More specifically, the IRAP was designed to present trials that omitted response options and instead relied on a sentence-completion approach to trials. This IRAP was administered along with established self-report measures of racial attitudes, providing a basis for re-evaluating convergent validity in comparison to the results obtained with existing studies.

Several researches have suggested a relation between verbal behavior and stimulus equivalence. For instance, verbal behavior may act as a facilitator in class formation of stimuli equivalence. We aimed to verify if autoclitics training facilitate the formation of the stimulus equivalence classes and its speed. Two experiments were conducted. During Experiment I, six participants (4 to 5 years old) were asked to talk about a set of daily pictures that could be combined, then, during pre-test, three of them, experimental group, were taught to use the autoclitic goes with when describing a new set of pictures, the other half, control group, was not taught to use autoclitics. Finally, all of them have gone through stimuli equivalence tests with familiar pictures and a post-test describing the same set of pictures from pre-test. Experiment II followed the same procedure, but, arbitrary stimuli were used during stimulus equivalence test. All participants from the experimental group formed stimuli equivalence classes (requiring 4 to 8 blocks, in Experiment I and 8 to 13 blocks in Experiment II). But, only two participants from the control group formed equivalence classes (8 blocks on Experiment I, 17 blocks on Experiment II). The data indicates that autoclitic may increase equivalence class formation and its speed.